Two of the CRESTA partners, Cray and EPCC, will be presenting a tutorial on Parallel Programming with Fortran Coarrays at SC11 on November 14th 2011.

The abstract of the tutorial provides further information:

Coarrays are a feature of the current international standard for Fortran which was published in November 2010. This new feature enables parallelism using a small set of additional language elements. A new array declaration syntax allows for remotely accessible variables, with data allocated across multiple ``images''. The execution model is that of a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) language with access to remote data provided by clear, simple syntax. Programming using coarrays has many potential advantages compared to the traditional approach of using MPI. Amongst these are simplicity, compiler checking and scope for automatic optimization of communications by the compiler. Coarrays can also be introduced incrementally to existing MPI codes to improve performance-critical kernels. Commercial compilers supporting coarrays are available from Cray and Intel; the g95 and gfortran projects have early implementations. This tutorial introduces coarrays and covers the related Fortran language features that support them. Hands-on practical exercises, integrated with the lectures, will illustrate using coarrays in practice: attendees will run these exercises in parallel on dedicated Cray hardware, or on their own laptops using freely available compilers. The presenters will share their experiences of using coarrays in application codes and microbenchmarks.

See:

http://sc11.supercomputing.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=tut105